The Genesee Reading Series, with impresario Wanda Schubmehl, continues to celebrate the 30th Anniversary of Writers & Books with a program featuring Bill Pruitt and Dwain Wilder.

Bill Pruitt has given poetry readings and done storytellings in many venues in Rochester and New York state. He has published three books of poetry, including chapbooks Ravine Street and Bold Cities and Golden Plains, and, most recently, a full-length collection, Walking Home from the Eastman House. He has also written short stories and a novel. He has worked as a construction laborer, loading dock receiver, hospital courier, natural food store manager, and, for the last two and a half decades, as a teacher of English as a Second Language for BOCES.

Dwain Wilder, born in a small town outside Dallas, graduated from Yale with a degree in American Studies, and moved to Rochester in 1970 to study Zen Buddhism. He has had leadership roles in the anti-Vietnam War and Civil Rights movements, and has worked as a navy flightcrew member, research technician, software engineer, and luther. He holds three patents, in semi-conductor device design and musical instrument innovation. His Appalachian dulcimers are held in high regard in the US and abroad, and he teaches dulcimer building in his studio and at the Northeast Dulcimer Symposium in Blue Mountain Lake. Dwain’s poetry collection, Under the Only Moon, was published in 2011 by FootHills Publishing. He lives with his wife and two dogs in a farmhouse on the edge of a park.

To download the flier for the event, click Genessee Reading Series 2-14-12.

The Genesee Reading Series will be held at Writers & Books, located at 740 University Avenue, Rochester, NY 14607, on Tuesday, February 14, 2011, at 7:30 p.m. Admission is $3 for members and $6 for the general public.

By the way

Just Poets is now on Google +. If you are on Google +, why not add us to your circle. You can find us here: http://gplus.to/justpoets.

(This list may be updated, so please check back. Plus, a few days before each event, there will be a more detailed posting about the event. If you want to stay abreast of all the events, why not subscribe to The Just Poets’ blog. Just scroll down until you see Email Subscription on your left, type in your email address, and click Sign me up! Every time there is a new post, you will be emailed, and you’ll never miss an event again! Or you can just follow us on Twitter @JustPoets. Just scroll down on the left, click The Just Poets Tweets, then on the Twitter page click +Follow.)

Be sure to check back for updates.

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Saturday, February 4 at 1:30 p.m. – The Just Poets monthly meeting at St. John Fisher College in the COP conference room on the second floor of the Campus Center. Open to members and prospective members. Kitty Jospe will give an overview of the recent Quincouplets experiment, followed by Larry Berger and John Roche discussing the question, “What Is Outlaw Poetry?” And, of course, workshops to follow, so bring copies of a poem to share.

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Thursday, February 9 at 7:00 p.m. – Ron Bailey will be the featured reader at the Just Poets Open Mic at  Pittsford Barnes & Noble, which is hosted by David Michael Nixon.  An Open Mic will follow. This even is free and open to the public. Ron Bailey has had poetry published in HazMat Review, Red Wheelbarrow, and several other magazines.  His poetry chapbook, green fire, was published by Bell’s Letters & Books in 2004.  Ron says he started writing in high school and hasn’t figured it out yet.  His fans are glad he’s come this far.

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Friday, February 10, (and most Fridays) at 8:00 a.m. – The Art and Philosophy Collision meets at the Twelve Corners’ Panera Bread. David White and Joe Thomson are the principals, all welcome.  This event is free and open to the public as the group continues to plan its 2012 program, “Committed to Abstraction in Poetry, Painting and All the Arts.”

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Tuesday, February 14, at 7:30 p.m. – The Genesee Reading Series, with impresario Wanda Schubmehl, continues to celebrate the 30th Anniversary of Writers & Books with a program featuring Bill Pruit and Dwain Wilder. Writers & Books is located at 740 University Avenue.

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Wednesday, February 15 at 7 p.m. – Thee official launch party for Dwain Wilder‘s and Karla Linn Merrifield‘s Liberty’s Vigil: The Occupy Anthology. It will be held at the Universalist Church downtown on South Clinton Ave., right across the street from the Occupy Rochester encampment.

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Wednesday, February 22 at 8:00 p.m. – Steve Fellner and M. J. Iuppa will be the featured reader’s at SUNY Brockport’s The Writers Forum, which is celebrating its 47th season. For more information, please visit The Writer’s Forum schedule.

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Saturday, February 25 at 7:30 – Wanda Schumbehl will be reading from her recent collection of poems, Schroedinger’s Cat, at A Different Path Galley, located at 27 Market Street in Brockport, NY.

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Rob Carney is the author of number of books, including Story Problems (Somondoco Press, 2011),  Weather Report (Somondoco Press, 2006), and Boasts, Toasts, and Ghosts (Pinyon Press, 2003), winner of the Pinyon Press National Poetry Book Award — and two chapbooks, New Fables, Old Songs (Dream Horse Press, 2003) and This Is One Sexy Planet (Frank Cat Press, 2005). His work has appeared in Mid-American Review, Quarterly West, and dozens of other journals, as well as Flash Fiction Forward (W. W. Norton, 2006). He lives in Salt Lake City. To hear an interview with him, the Poet Laureate of Utah, Katharine Coles, and the editor at Sugar House Review, John Kippen, click here.

Sean Thomas Dougherty is the author of nine books of poems and prose including the Sasha Sings the Laundry on the Line (BOA, 2010), Broken Hallelujahs (Boa Editions, 2007), the experimental novella The Blue City (Marick Press, 2008) and Nightshift Belonging to Lorca (Mammoth Books, 2004), which was a finalist for the Paterson Poetry Prize. His awards include a PA Council for the Arts Fellowship in Poetry, and a Penn State Junior Faculty Fellowship in Non-Fiction. He teaches in the BFA Program for Creative Writing at Penn State Erie.

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Rob Carney is the author of number of books, including Story Problems (Somondoco Press, 2011),  Weather Report (Somondoco P, 2006) and Boasts, Toasts, and Ghosts (Pinyon Press, 2003), winner of the Pinyon Press National Poetry Book Award — and two chapbooks, New Fables, Old Songs (Dream Horse Press, 2003) and This Is One Sexy Planet (Frank Cat Press, 2005). His work has appeared in Mid-American Review, Quarterly West, and dozens of other journals, as well as Flash Fiction Forward (W. W. Norton, 2006). He lives in Salt Lake City. To hear an interview with him, the Poet Laureate of Utah, Katharine Coles, and the editor at Sugar House Review, John Kippen, click here.

Tom Holmes is the editor of Redactions: Poetry & Poetics (www.redactions.com). He is also author of: Poems for an Empty Church (Palettes & Quills Press, 2011), which was nominated for The Pulitzer Prize; The Oldest Stone in the World (Amsterdam Press, 1-1-11, 12:00:00 a.m (the first book released in 2011)); Henri, Sophie, & the Hieratic Head of Ezra Pound: Poems Blasted from the Vortex (BlazeVOX Books, 2009); Pre-Dew Poems (FootHills Publishing, 2008); Negative Time (Pudding House, 2007); After Malagueña (FootHills Publishing, 2005), and Poetry Assignments: The Book (Sage Hill Press, forthcoming). And he has thrice been nominated for the Pushcart Prize.

This event is sponsored by RIT and Palettes & Quills.

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Tom Holmes is the editor of Redactions: Poetry & Poetics (www.redactions.com). He is also author of: Poems for an Empty Church (Palettes & Quills Press, 2011), which was nominated for The Pulitzer Prize; The Oldest Stone in the World (Amsterdam Press, 1-1-11, 12:00:00 a.m (the first book released in 2011)); Henri, Sophie, & the Hieratic Head of Ezra Pound: Poems Blasted from the Vortex (BlazeVOX Books, 2009); Pre-Dew Poems (FootHills Publishing, 2008); Negative Time (Pudding House, 2007); After Malagueña (FootHills Publishing, 2005), and Poetry Assignments: The Book (Sage Hill Press, forthcoming). And he has thrice been nominated for the Pushcart Prize.

His work has appeared on Verse Daily and has also appeared in Blue Earth Review, The Chaffey Review, Chiron Review, Crab Creek Review, The Delmarva Review, The G. W. Review, Mississippi Review, Mid-American Review, New Delta Review, New Zoo Poetry Review, North Chicago Review, Orange Coast Review, The Portland Review, Rockhurst Review, San Pedro River Review, Santa Clara Review, South Carolina Review, Sugar House Review, Swarthmore Review, and many other journals that don’t have “Review” in their name.

To read Charles Cote’s interview with him, click here.

To read his essays on poetry, poetry book reviews, wine tastings and more, visit The Line Break.

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Palettes & Quills

3^rd Biennial Poetry Chapbook Competition

with Judge J. P. Dancing Bear

Open to All Writers

http://www.palettesnquills.com

Prize: A $200 cash award plus 50 copies of the published book. Additional copies will be available at an author’s discount. All finalists will receive one free copy of the published book. All contest entrants will be offered a special discount on the purchase price of the published book.

A complete submission should include:

• Manuscript between 14-50 pages on 8 ½ x 1″ paper. Use a standard 12 pt font, such as Garamond or Times New Roman. Manuscripts should be in English and contain no illustrations.
• A cover sheet with the contest name (The Palettes & Quills 3^rd Biennial Chapbook Contest), your name, address, telephone, email, and the title of your manuscript. Your name should not appear anywhere else in the manuscript.
• A title page with just the title of the manuscript.
• An acknowledgements page. Poems included in your manuscript may be previously published, but please include an acknowledgements page listing specific publications.
• A complete Table of Contents.
• Payment of a $20.00 non-refundable entry fee (check or money order payable in U.S. dollars made out to Palettes & Quills). Please do not send cash. Multiple submissions are accepted, but we require a separate entry fee for each manuscript you submit.
• Self-addressed stamped post card for confirmation of receipt and a self-addressed envelope stamped (please use a Forever Stamp) for announcement of the winners. (International submissions must include an IRC.)
• You must also include a statement that all poems are your own original work.

Mail your entry to Donna M. Marbach, Palettes & Quills Chapbook Contest, 330 Knickerbocker Avenue, Rochester, NY 14615. Manuscripts will not be returned. No electronic or faxed submissions will be accepted. However, we will request an electronic copy of the winning manuscript.

Deadline: September 1, 2012. Manuscripts postmarked after September 1 will not be read.

Winners will be announced on the Palettes & Quills website in December 2012.

Manuscripts by multiple authors will not be accepted. Translations will not be accepted.

Simultaneous submissions are accepted. If your manuscript is accepted for publication elsewhere, you must immediately notify Palettes & Quills.

Judging: Final judge is J. P. Dancing Bear. J. P. Dancing Bear is the author of nine collections of poetry, most recently, Inner Cities Of Gulls (2010, Salmon Poetry), winner of a PEN Oakland-Josephine Miles National Literary Awards. His next two books are: Family of Marsupial Centaurs, will be released by Iris Press; and Fish Singing Foxes, will be released by Salmon Poetry. He is editor for the American Poetry Journal and Dream Horse Press. Bear also hosts the weekly hour-long poetry show, OUT OF OUR MINDS, on public station, KKUP and available as podcasts.

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To download a PDF of the guidelines, click here.

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The Genesee Reading Series, with impresario Wanda Schubmehl, continues to celebrate the 30th Anniversary of Writers & Books with a program featuring Cathryn Smith and Tony Leuzzi.

Cathryn Smith was born and raised just outside New York City, went to the University of New Hampshire for her BA and MA degrees, and has lived in Rochester for the past 21 years. Her publications include many poems in small magazines as well as a memoir, The Glory Walk: A Memoir, about her father’s death from Alzheimer’s disease. Currently she is working on another creative nonfiction project, Finding Jezebel, about her search for a boat owned by her family some 35 years ago. Cathryn is also the chair of the English/Philosophy department at MCC, where she has taught for 19 years.

Tony Leuzzi teaches writing and literature at Monroe Community College. He is also the author of three books of poems: Tongue-Tied and Singing (FootHills Publishing, 2004), Radiant Losses (New Sins Press, 2010); and Fake Book (forthcoming from Anything Anymore Anywhere Press in 2012). Eclectic, intelligent, and passionate, his poetry has earned good notices from both mainstream and experimental writers alike. BOA Editions will release his book of interviews with 20 American poets in fall 2012.

The Genesee Reading Series will be held at Writers & Books, located at 740 University Avenue, Rochester, NY 14607, on Tuesday, January 10, 2011, at 7:30 p.m. Admission is $3 for members and $6 for the general public.

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Oh, and Just Poets is now on Google +. If you are on Google +, why not add us to your circle. You can find us here: http://gplus.to/justpoets.

(This list may be updated, so please check back. Plus, a few days before each event, there will be a more detailed posting about the event. If you want to stay abreast of all the events, why not subscribe to The Just Poets’ blog. Just scroll down until you see Email Subscription on your left, type in your email address, and click Sign me up! Every time there is a new post, you will be emailed, and you’ll never miss an event again! Or you can just follow us on Twitter @JustPoets. Just scroll down on the left, click The Just Poets Tweets, then on the Twitter page click +Follow.)

Be sure to check back for updates.

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Saturday, January 7 at 1:30 p.m. – The Just Poets monthly meeting at St. John Fisher College  in the  COP conference room on the second floor of the Campus Center.

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Tuesday, January 10 at 7:30 p.m. —  The Genesee Reading Series, with impresario Wanda Schubmehl, features Cathryn Smith and Tony Leuzzi . The Genesee Reading Series continues its 31st year at Writers & Books, located at 740 University Avenue.

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Thursday, January 12 at 7:00 p.m. – Ann C. Putnam will be the featured reader at the monthly the Just Poets Reading Series hosted by David Michael Nixon. The reading will be held in the upstairs Community Room at the Pittsford Barnes & Noble. It will be followed by an open mic. Bring a poem or two to read and share with your fellow poets and other readers.

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Wednesday, January 18 at 4 p.m – John Roche and Vincent F.A. Golphin read at Shop One 2, Global Village, RIT.

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Saturday, January 21 at 3-5 p.m – Def Meets Deaf Poetry Jam IV at Lovin’ Cup Bistro, Park Point, Jefferson Road, Henrietta. Hosted by Eddie Swayze and John Roche. ASL poets include Susan Smith, Vicki Nordquist, Matt Schwartz, Luane Davis Haggerty, Eddie Swayze, and several NTID Theatre students. Other poets include Wanda Schubmehl, Catherine Faurot, Danielle Smith, Paulette Swartzfager, Vincent F.A. Golphin, Lori Nolasco, Chan McKenzie, Nicolas Eckerson, Grace Flores, and John Roche. (Just Poets members are in bold.)

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Monday, January 23 – Expressions of King’s Legacy Celebration at RIT’s Gordon Field House

• 12:05–12:25 p.m. – Performance by Garth Fagan Dance.
• 12:30–12:45 p.m. – Performance by poet Joshua Bennett.
• 12:50–1:35 p.m. – Keynote Address by Cornel West.

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Tuesday, January 24 at 4 p.m. – Lucille Clifton Tribute at RIT’s Fireside Lounge, Student Alumni Union, with a number of students, faculty, and area poets reading Lucille’s poems.

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Thursday, January 26 at 7:00 p.m. – Tom Holmes book release reading for Poems for an Empty Church (Palettes & Quills, 2011) at Writers & Books. To order Tom’s book, click Poems for an Empty Church. Writers & Books is located at 740 University Avenue.

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Friday, January 27 at 7:30 p.m. –  Rob Carney (from Utah) and Tom Holmes at RIT Liberal Arts Faculty Commons (06-1251), right across from the Wallace Library. Rob Carney’s most recent book is Story Problems (Somondoco Press, 2011).  To order it, click Story Problems. Tom Holmes most recent book is Poems for an Empty Church (Palettes & Quills). To order it click Poems for an Empty Church.

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Saturday, January 28 at 7:30 p.m. – Rob Carney (from Utah) and Sean Thomas Dougherty at A Different Path Gallery on 27 Market Street in Brockport. Rob Carney’s most recent book is Story Problems (Somondoco Press, 2011).  To order it, click Story Problems. Sean Thomas Dougherty’s newest book is Sasha Sings the Laundry on the Line (BOA, 2010).

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Sunday, January 29 at 4 p.m. – Tom Holmes and Donna Marbach at Books, Etc. in Macedon. Tom Holmes most recent book is Poems for an Empty Church (Palettes & Quills). To order it click Poems for an Empty Church. Books, Etc. is located at 78 West Main St., Macedon, NY 14502.

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The final Genesee Reading Series of the Writers & Books 30th Anniversary Year features our very own Joe Flaherty and his daughter, Caedra Scott-Flaherty.  You do not want to miss this opportunity to hear Joe and Caedra read from their own work.  Come share with us this very fitting end to the wonderful 2011 Genesee Reading Series season!

The Genesee Reading Series, with impresario Wanda Schubmehl, continues to celebrate the 30th Anniversary of Writers & Books with a program featuring Joe Flaherty and Caedra Scott-Flaherty.

The Genesee Reading Series will be held at Writers & Books, located at 740 University Avenue, Rochester, NY 14607, on Tuesday, December 13, 2011, at 7:30 p.m. Admission is $3 for members and $6 for the general public.

Joe Flaherty, the Executive/Artistic Director of Writers & Books, received his B.A. in English from Penn State University and his MFA from the University of Buffalo. He founded Writers & Books in 1981 out of the belief that writing, and the appreciation of literature, needed to be promoted as life-long activities to the widest possible audience. He has served as a speaker, arts panelist and consultant throughout the country and has been honored in Rochester with a number of major awards, including The Arts Person of the Year from the Rochester Chamber of Commerce.

Caedra Scott-Flaherty is the recipient of the 2008 R. Rofihe Trophy Award for short fiction. She read at the 2010 Brooklyn Book Festival, and her fiction appears in One Story, Open City, and Avery: An Anthology of New Fiction and is forthcoming in Slice Magazine and The New England Review. She is a graduate of the MFA program at New York University, and received a B.A. from Brown University. Recently, she was awarded a residency at the Millay Colony for the Arts.

To download the flier for the event, click Genessee Reading Series 12-13-11.

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Here’s what they are saying about the book:

I’ve had a good time with Poems for an Empty Church, which is a big book, capacious, and surprised me with its often free-flowing and associational aesthetics.  As you want (usually) a cubist perspective(s), and as you say you want your poem/accept your poem as smarter than you are, you hit all sorts of interesting effects.  So, friend, way to go. I peered through the rocks into that eye & land of yours ….

– William Heyen, author of Shoah Train (finalist for the National Book Award)

Of course, no church is ever really empty unless people let ritual and myth lapse into repetition and dogma. Even then it isn’t empty, just empty of awe. That’s when origin stories are most necessary, and that’s what Tom Holmes provides in abundance: Moons create amazement, then stones create reflection, then people come along creating words, aggression, fire, flutes, art, physics, and probably our destruction, everything progressing ’til it returns full circle. Along the way, “statues pry themselves from sides of buildings / and exit the city / clutching their plaques.” Along the way, a lot of fine poems unfold, one containing a curse: “you have succeeded / in being only what you thought / you should be.” It’s a curse because we ought to be more. In a century in need of a giant do-over, Poems for an Empty Church reminds us of that. Even better, it makes a good lever or spark.

– Rob Carney, author of Story Problems, Weather Report, and Boasts, Toasts, and Ghosts

In Poems for an Empty Church, Tom Holmes writes of birth and death and the life we live in between those two events in beautifully sculpted lines carved into the white space that surrounds them. “I dare say I can hear / muddy angels singing /the lines of God,” he writes in “The Calculus of a Tod Marshall Book of Poems.” There are plenty of angels in Tom Holmes’ poems too, but one must be still enough to hear and appreciate the whisk of wings hovering over these powerful meditations.

– Sarah Freligh, author of Sort of Gone

I think of Charles Olsen when I read Tom Holmes’ poems: open, investigative, prophetic, often with mystical implications. These are the elements of our best modernist poems, and Holmes is a modernist – or a pre-modernist, or a post-pre-modernist. And there lies the real interesting part of his poems, they are hard to fit into anyone anywhere. He sits us in an empty church and says listen. He knows “it was the moons talked first.” He knows the dreams we dream even when “we wheeze / asleep in our boxes of shadows.” In these poems and parables is our collective of fire and nightfall, origins and endings, monochromatics, rivers, and stretch marks. Sappho makes a rare presence, but this is a book more stone-carved than page-written and she too is an ancient muse. As this author’s I is an absent eye, scanning the world of caves and shadows to find clouds who feed themselves, ghosts like alphabets, and men who whittle bones into flutes.

– Sean Thomas Dougherty, author of Sasha Sings the Laundry on the Line and Broken Hallelujahs

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Poems for an Empty Church was officially released September 2, 2011, from Palettes & Quills. Founded in 2002, Palettes & Quills is devoted to the celebration and expansion of the literary and visual arts and offers both commissioned and consulting services. Palettes & Quills works to support beginning and emerging writers and artists to expand their knowledge, improve their skills, and connect to other resources in the community. Further, Palettes & Quills seeks to increase the public’s awareness and appreciation of these arts through education, advocacy, hands-on assistance, and by functioning as a literary press.

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To download a printable version of the poster, click Tom Holmes’ Poems for an Empty Church Reading.

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